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The paper aims to examine how employees influence their employer’s brand by applying Taylor’s (1999) six segment message strategy wheel in an employee influencer context.

The research uses a content analysis of employees’ public social media posts – including captions and images – to analyze the message strategies employees use to promote their employers.

While ego and social were popular message strategies in both the images and captions, the findings evidence the varying message strategies employees use in text-based versus image-based messages. Four “imagined audiences” of employee influencers are identified: current customers, prospective customers, current employees and prospective employees.

The research provides insight into how employees act as influencers in building their employer brand on social media.

A unique measurement tool is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

This research contributes to theory and practice in the following important ways. First, the research provides a modernization of an existing framework from an offline setting to an applied industry context in an online setting. Second, this research focuses on a subtype of social media influencer, the employee influencer, which is an underdeveloped area of research. Third, a unique measurement tool to analyze text-based and image-based social media data is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

The practice of frontline employees articulating their brand voice and posting work-related content on social media has emerged; however, employee brand equity (EBE) research has yet to be linked to employees’ social media activity. This paper aims to take a methods-based approach to better understand employees’ roles as influencers. As such, its objective is to operationalize and apply the three EBE dimensions – brand consistent behavior, brand endorsement and brand allegiance – using Instagram data.

This qualitative research uses a case study of employee influencers at SoulCycle, a leading North American fitness company and examines 100 Instagram images and 100 captions from these influential employees to assess the three EBE dimensions.

Brand consistent behavior (what employees do) was the most important EBE dimension indicating that employees’ social media activities align with their employer’s values. Brand allegiance (what employees intend to do in the future) whereby employees self-identify with their employer on social media, followed. Brand endorsement (what employees say) was the least influential of the three EBE dimensions, which may indicate a higher level of perceived authenticity from a consumer perspective.

This research makes three contributions. First, it presents a novel measure of EBE using public Instagram data. Second, it represents a unique expansion and an evolution of King et al.’s (2012) model. Third, it considers employees’ work-related content on social media to understand employees’ role as influencers and their co-creation of EBE, which is currently an under-represented perspective in the internal branding literature.

Social media management is an emerging profession that is growing as companies increasingly adopt social media. The purpose of this paper is to analyze social media managers’ personal branding.

In-depth qualitative data is drawn from 20 semi-structured interviews with social media managers and supported by three years of orienting fieldwork in Toronto, Canada.

Social media managers are responsible for managing and executing organizations’ brands and presence on social media and digital platforms. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media. “The future audience” is introduced to describe how individuals project a curated brand for all future unknown and unanticipated audiences, which emphasizes a professional identity. Due to workplace uncertainty, social media managers embody the mentality of being “always-on-the-job-market”, which is a driver for personal branding in their attempt to gain or maintain employment.

While personal branding is largely discussed by industry professionals, there is a need for empirical research on personal branding that examines how various employee groups experience personal branding. This research fills this gap by analyzing how people working in social media brand their identity and how their personal branding is used to market themselves to gain and maintain employment. The development of “the future audience” and “always-on-the-job-market” can be used to understand other professions and experiences of personal branding.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony with the goal of making a nuanced contribution to the discussion of online participation and engagement afforded by social media.

This paper applies a qualitative approach of sequential video analysis to the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony interpretive segment.

Despite the Olympics being a “networked media sport” where countries compete against each another in various sporting events, the paper argues that the overarching narrative of the London 2012 opening ceremony is one that breaks down traditional barriers, while simultaneously situating the individual at the centre of “networked spectatorship”.

Beyond merely watching media events, the paper proposes the term, “networked spectators” to identify how people participate in the content creation, social media moderation, and conversation using social media. Networked spectatorship moves away from the binary of active and passive participation, and rather reflects on the multiple ways people can engage in media events, which specifically includes social media monitoring/moderation as a form of participation.

In this chapter, we use the concepts of emotional labor or emotion work to examine the experiences of transracial families – white families rearing Black adoptees. We focus on the emotion work done by the parents to inculcate and develop positive racial identities for their adoptive children as their adoptees experience racial mistreatment. We also use the concept of white racial framing to examine strategies for effectively coping with racial mistreatment. African Americans have more emotion work than the members of dominant group because of their status as stigmatized minorities in American society. African Americans adopted by white families have even greater emotion work because they tend to have the extra burden of living in predominately white communities where there are fewer people of color to serve as positive role models in the socialization process.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key antecedents of attitude towards electronic deals (e-deals) and factors influencing purchase intention of e-deals. Specifically, perceived value and price consciousness will be tested as antecedents of attitudes towards e-deals. Attitudes towards e-deals, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control are proposed to have strong influences upon purchase intention. The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) provides the theoretical underpinning of the conceptual framework.

Data were collected through convenience sampling. Overall, 611 valid responses of 780 distributed surveys were collected. Only 426 e-deals users were analysed by using structural equation modelling to test the hypotheses.

It is found that perceived value is a strong predictor of attitudes towards e-deals. Another finding also indicates that attitudes towards e-deals and normative influence positively affect consumers’ purchase intention towards e-deals.

Practitioners are advised to integrate social media (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) and online communities to approach the “leader” to influence new potential consumers to purchase e-deals. It is also important to maintain the good value of e-deals and emphasise the huge benefits of using e-deals to persuade consumers to purchase it.

The originality of this study lies in extending the TPB as a robust measurement to investigate online shopping behaviour in the context of e-deals.